Lightscape application with light stencils

• Main Author: Lee, King Hung
• Other Authors: Chia Liang Tien
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2014
• Subjects: DRNTU::Visual arts and music::Photography
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/59888
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Light painting is a popular photography nowadays. It is done by recording the trail of light in a single exposure. While there are many ways to create light-painting photo, flashing stencils during the capture process is a very specific way to include light forms into photo. A light stencil is made up of the stencil image and lightbox (something that flashes the stencil image). The aim of this project is to create a system that will create light stencil without the need of making stencil images and increase the accuracy of the light stencil’s position in the photo. A tablet will be used to replace the handmade light stencil and lightbox, a robot car will carry the tablet to a desired position, and then the tablet will flash the stencil image during the capture. In this system, Raspberry Pi, a single-board computer, acts as a coordinator, which uses Python codes to control the tablet, camera and Arduino, a single-board microcontroller which controls the robot car. An Android app was developed for stencil flashing, as well as the ability to let users to do camera settings, choose the stencils they want and tell the system where the stencils should be. To do a light stenciling, first the users need to use the app in the tablet to put “fake stencils” in a pre-captured photo to have a preview. After they press the capture button in the app, they will be asked to put the tablet in a tablet frame on the robot car and locate the robot car. Next, the tablet will flash a testing light stencil and the camera will capture that. After image processing, the current tablet frame’s location and size of testing light stencil in the camera frame will be calculated to determine the light stencil’s size and the robot car’s movement. The real capture will begin after all the calculations. In this project, a detailed research on light stenciling has been conducted. A robot car was made to carry the tablet. On programming side, a Python script were developed for Raspberry Pi coordination work, Arduino codes were written to control the robot car and an Android app was made for user GUI and stencil flashing function.